The Roads of Taryn MacTavish, page 60
part #3 of Lords of Arcadia Series
she said. “What’s your fancy telling you now?”
“Mm.” He hunkered down, peering closely at her instep, but keeping his hands politely to himself, as if her foot were an exhibit in a museum. The expression on his—Tonka’s—face was faintly incredulous and his tone, distracted. “We immortals must spend all of eternity in one another’s reach. It behooves me nothing to earn another’s enmity.”
“Which means what?”
“I see the mark of the Riverman on you.”
Taryn sat up and pulled her foot around to stare at it.
“Invisible,” said Quiabe, smiling. “Yet indelible.”
“Oh.” She folded her foot back under the blankets and Quiabe rose, looking distantly disappointed.
“Besides,” he said, looking away toward the blank surround of this non-place. “I have been this night with Sri. My carnal urgings are quiet.”
“I don’t think I know her.”
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“Nor should you.” He spared her a glance, a shrug. “One of my own pantheon, from your world. What your kind calls a demon. And one of the last survivors of the war. The other gods exiled here refused to bring her among them, fearing her malevolent will, but she was gentled enough by the prospect of death.” That smile again. It was a lot less likable now. “I promised to speak for her, provided she submit thereafter to my sexual demands.”
“Wow. You really are a jerk.”
“I am Quiabe.” One shoulder lifted in an unconcerned shrug. “Sri should have made a better effort to endear herself to her fellows when the opportunity was with her. As she did not, it falls to her to suffer my embrace.”
“Suffer.”
“You mistake me, mortal. I have caused pain, but never from malice. I seek only my own release.”
“Poor Sri.” Taryn took a moment to reflect on the misery of this heretofore unknown immortal. “What does she do now?”
“Nothing.” Quiabe was circling the bed again. “She grieves. She’ll lose her cohesion soon, I think, and die the death she feared so greatly when she fled your Earth.”
“It doesn’t sound like it troubles you too much.”
“Nor does it. I have other goddesses to attend my needs.”
“Jerk.”
“And mortals such as you, though rare.”
“Such as me,” Taryn agreed, rolling her eyes. “What is it about me, anyway?”
“You are human. So many of Arcadia’s peoples were blended from human stock by magical means. Deep in the bones of their memories, it lies in them to desire humankind, to breed by them anew. Hatred absolves such yearnings, but you inspire no hatred, and so desire comes swiftly.”
“Huh.” Taryn lay down again, considering this. “I hadn’t realized there was really a reason.”
“For everything in all the Realms, there are reasons.”
“How comforting.”
“Indeed.”
Taryn dozed a bit longer, rubbing gently at her flat stomach. “Madira was afraid of you,” she said finally.
“Mm.” He slipped behind her and stopped there. Looking at her hair, maybe. “Why?”
“She was afraid you’d burn her up begetting your cubs of fire. You don’t look very fiery.”
“Why would this…Madira…think I would come to her?”
“I’m not sure, but I think she thought you’d just have everyone in the cave to make sure you got me.”
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“How odd.” Quiabe finally moved back into her field of vision, looking thoughtful. “But no, never fear it. Rare is the woman who may safely mate with immortals, and rare the woman who may procreate with one, but rarest of all is the woman in whom these two qualities intersect. You are not so blessed.”
“That’s fantastic news.”
“It is different for human males,” Quiabe mused. “For them, it matters not if death takes them. They might sire of their killing throes regardless. I don’t know why so many of your myths tell of fathering gods and mortal mothers when it is nearly always the other way around.”
“Because myths give people an excuse to copy behavior,” Taryn replied sleepily. “Men want to screw around and they want their wives to stay faithful.”
“Hm. There may be some truth to that. For though Pacha Ven is well-skilled in the carnal arts, I do prefer Sri. Her demon’s flesh has healing properties. She is virgin each time that I take her.” Quiabe smiled, then focused on her again. “You interest me, mortal. Will you remove these coverings that I might look upon your soul’s flesh?”
“Sure.” Seemed the polite thing to do, no different than when, back on Earth, she’d been asked to remove her shoes on entering someone’s house.
Taryn peeled back her bedding and held it away while Quiabe studied her naked body. “May I ask you a favor?” she wondered.
“Equivalent to this offering,” he replied, not raising his eyes from his intensive inspection of her left leg. “You may.”
“Can you tell me if my baby is going to be all right?”
“Not with certainty. I have no interest in offspring beyond the act of conception,” he added. But he moved toward her anyway, extending his arm. “I must touch you,” he said, and dipped his hand down, onto her and then into her.
Taryn looked at his wrist where it joined to her belly. It didn’t hurt, but it did feel weird. Almost like another kind of pregnancy.
“I can say that you are healthy,” Quiabe said. He sounded faintly surprised. “Well fit for this sorcerous bearing. It was you who bore the mark, was it?”
The Sowing Mark. The killing curse that the wizard set on her to make her willing, and which would have opened her mind wholly to him if only he had taken her afterwards instead of Antilles. The wizard meant it to enslave her.
Antilles had used its same powers to set her free.
“Yes,” she said, closing her mind to that memory. “It was me.”
“Hm.” His hand withdrew. His gaze was speculative. “I remember you better now from my follower’s coupling. I think it would be quite entertaining to have you.”
For a moment, no longer than the time it takes to blink an eye, there was fire in Quiabe. Flames spilling up from his calm, staring eyes. Flames crackling 467
through his smiling mouth. His skin was hollow, a mask he wore and changed as necessary, but beneath it, she saw, Quiabe was flame.
Then it was gone. “Another time perhaps,” he said. He returned to his place at the foot of her bed and sat.
Taryn covered herself again and lay back into the pillows. “Whatever happened to, ‘Immortals don’t bogart one another’s sha-boopies?’”
“His interest may someday wane.” The god rolled one shoulder in a shrug, then smiled, letting his eyes rove over her body freely. “And when his mark upon you fades, I shall visit you again.”
“Think so?”
“What I desire, I possess.”
“And you don’t care about anyone else’s feelings?”
“I do,” he said, with a certain note of wounded pride. “I know that the Riverman would feel distress if you are injured in our coupling. Behold, I restrain myself.”
“I kind of meant my feelings.”
“Ah.” He thought about it, then shrugged again. “Then you are correct.
I do not concern myself with mortal feelings.”
Taryn laughed, shaking her head. “You really are a jerk, you know.”
Quiabe frowned. The glow of hidden flame spread slowly through his body, illuminating his brown skin until he stood out from the nothing surrounding them in a way that hurt her eyes. It wasn’t that he was bright, but he was real, so much more real. Taryn twisted away as her subconscious mind spat out some fragment of Greek mythology, one of Zeus’s human lovers asking to see his true form and being burnt to ash by the sight of unrestrained divinity.
“I am trying to understand you, mortal,” Quiabe said, burning out until she could feel the heat of him baking onto her bare skin. “I give to this world. I give its people health beyond the dreams of any world in all the universe. You, who traveled from your own Earth to a world that had never known such things as smallpox, polio, influenza, you clasped hands with those you met and spared not a thought for what your idle hand may pass alongside your greeting!”
Taryn pushed herself slowly upright in the bed, feeling her breath grow heavy and cold inside her. Quiabe raised his chin, glowering, nodding satisfaction at her unease.
“That is my gift, mortal,” he declared. “You live now because of my work in this world. Did you think you had the right to freely go among satyr and Farasai, lycan and Cerosan, Pathfinder and griffin, and never suffer consequences? That is no mere hubris, mortal, that is blasphemy.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, and she meant it.
Perhaps he knew. He faded, eyeing her in silence, until he had taken back a semblance of normalcy. As a kind of peace offering, Taryn shifted the 468
blankets, letting them fall around her waist as she sat forward. His eyes went immediately to her bared arm, taking in every curve, every line and shadow.
“No, I do not care for all the lives I steward,” he continued, his attention fixed to her inner elbow. “But I serve them. And as part of that service, I have had immortals only for my pleasure for hundreds of years. I know what they say of me. It is not true. I would not snuff out even so transitory a life as yours merely to find sexual release.” His eyes shifted, stabbing at hers. “But am I not entitled payment equal to my labors?”
She could see his point, but there was still something in her that resisted being thought of as payment. She’d been currency in this world too often already. She bent her head to think, unable to meet even this muted radiance and still form an argument. “When Anu came to me,” she said finally, staring at her hands in a pool of blanket. “He called me his priestess. We shared something that felt sacred and pure.”
“I am pure!” Quiabe said hotly.
Taryn bit her lip and, muttering, he retreated a pace from the bed and gestured curtly for her to continue.
“You don’t act like you want me for a priestess,” she said. “You act like you want me for Kleenex. Telling me that I owe you, that everyone owes you for what you do for us, but that I get to pick up the check just because it won’t kill me…that’s a kind of blasphemy, too.”
Quiabe was quiet. She risked a glance and saw him looking away into the nothing, still scowling, but also considering.
“Your words,” he said at last, and with a great deal of finality, “are irrelevant.”
He looked at her, examining her shoulders without seeming to notice their discouraged slump. “Until the Riverman’s concern for you lessens, I shall not consider you as priestess, nor as…Kleenex.” His eyes flicked to hers, narrowing briefly and with a touch of orange light, before traveling down to her breasts. “When that happens, perhaps we shall converse again.”
Taryn sighed, lifting a hand and dropping it again in a gesture of defeat.
He saw it, recognized it for what it was, and remained unmoved. “Your heat attracts me,” he told her bluntly. “And for that, you have none to blame but your own kind. Before our encounter with your Earth, before we were defined into these forms and imbued with these energies, I, like all my pantheon, had no interest in sex. Mankind made us greater than themselves, but they made us in their own image. In honesty, I confess that of all the changes humanity has made in me, I enjoy carnality the most.” His attention wandered again. He turned toward the nothing and began to fade back into its shadows as he walked away.
“I will seek out Sri again, I think. Perhaps she is healed. And you, mortal, you should waken, if you truly wish not to mate tonight.”
“Should I?”
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“Oh yes.” The god raised his hand and splayed his fingers, releasing a grip on empty air. “Waken, Taryn.”
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82. Waking in the Dark
Taryn opened her eyes. It was early, before sunrise even made ‘day’
official, and while it was not Quiabe whose hands were stealthily attempting to pull her away from Sangar’s embrace and into the thicket, someone sure was and begetting was clearly on his mind. “The hell?” was her intelligent query, whereupon that very realm seemed to open up and cover Arcadia.
Nakaroth went from sound asleep on the raised rock to a snarling, avenging demon right in front of her. The wolf who had her growled half-heartedly, took three punches in earth-shaking succession for his trouble, and ran yelping off into the woods. Taryn couldn’t even say for certain who it had been.
She kicked her way back into position against her tree, staring up at Nakaroth in shock. Her heart was hammering and her baby, stirred by her panic, began to kick in the same hard rhythm. Nakaroth didn’t bother to look back at her and when she stopped trying to make eye contact and took in a little more of her surroundings, she could see the shine of many silent, staring eyes.
Nakaroth growled in the back of his throat and lay down where he was.
The heat of his muscled sides pressed at her leg. In a short time, he was quiet again.
Taryn was not. Although her pulse slowed eventually and her breaths lost that gaspy quality, sleep was good and gone. She stared at the gleaming eyes of the Fringes until they began to shut themselves away, but the disbelief in her did not recede. One of them had tried to take her. One of them had actually tried to drag her away with him. She hadn’t seen his face, but she had seen the pale stripe of his erection in his night-dark fur. If she hadn’t said anything, or if he’d thought to cover her mouth—
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“Easy, Taryn,” Sangar muttered sleepily. “It happens.”
And that, that simple female resignation, that was the thing that swallowed her with claustrophobic fear. It happens? No, no. Ants happen at picnics and rainbows happen after storms, but Fringe-wolves dragging people off in the middle of the night is not a ‘just happens’ situation.
And now she had to pee. Midnight panic or just a by-product of being a year pregnant, her bladder was sending out signal flares. The thought of wandering off into the bushes (just like she’d done a hundred times already, confident in her safety as Kruin’s mate, untouchable, protected) raised icy gooseflesh on her arms. The thought of wetting herself while she sat here with Sangar and Nakaroth wasn’t much better. She blinked rapidly and felt the sting of tears.
Nakaroth rolled over onto his back and looked at her. His eyes were invisible. He was nothing but a puddle of black with that single white crescent glowing out from his fur to indicate where he aimed his gaze. He scratched lazily at his stomach and said, “Give me your hand.”
The command baffled her and the confusion momentarily pushed all the fear to one side. Taryn hesitantly obeyed, uncurling her fingers one at a time and waiting tensely for…something.
Nakaroth’s hand, warm and leathery and incredibly strong, wrapped around her wrist. The scratchy tip of one claw traced a line across the ticklish field of her palm. A familiar line. One she’d traced herself a few times. “What happened here?” he asked.
“I got an infection right after I got to the Valley. That’s where Ven had to cut it out. Ven is—”
“I know who she is.” Nakaroth released her wrist and took the other. He traced that scar, too. “There were Farasai in the Land of Tooth and Claw once.
Long, long ago. Most died. The rest went away. It is difficult for them to survive in forest-land.” He was quiet for a moment, just touching her palm, rubbing that line in over and over. “They are formidable hunters.”
“They’re also formidable farmers,” Taryn said, trying to smile even though she didn’t think he could see it.
“Here.” He pulled her hand down, ignoring her startled instinct to yank her hand free of him, and soon her fingers were sunk into the thick drift of his belly fur. “Do you feel?”
A puckered ridge interrupted the smooth plane of his skin. Taryn felt at it, frowning.
“Wyvern,” Nakaroth said. He sounded pleased with himself.
“We don’t have them on Earth,” Taryn said. “I’ve never seen anything so horrible. I can’t even say just why it was horrible, it just was.”
“Mm. Yet you faced it.”
“So did you.”
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“Ha! I have faced many wyvern. Thousands,” he said confidently.
“Eight and ten of them. I have trophies of my own, ha. Dark Water’s wolves hunt the young ones for every first Full Hunt. But I have never seen one of their grown slain by just one hunter. Do you hunt in the Valley?”
Twin memories swam in on her at the same time, briefly generating a swell in her that was almost akin to seasickness. She saw herself weaving baskets to catch fish down by the river. She saw herself leaping to seize the horn of a charging nyati bull, heaving at its head to turn it before it could trample a fallen Tonka. She said, “Sort of.”
“Fellcats?” Nakaroth asked. He was still holding onto her wrist, keeping her hand on him. She couldn’t even be entirely sure just where she was touching him.
“I’ve never set out to hunt a fellcat,” she said. “Do you have them here?”
“What a strange way to avoid answering me.”
Taryn could feel herself blushing. She said, “One time, I had to attack one. Well, there were two of them there, but I only hit one.”
“With a stick?”
“With a rock.”
“One of these?” He tugged at her stone pouch. He must be able to see, at least better than she could. She thought she’d read somewhere that dogs and wolves couldn’t see very well at all. But then, these were lycan, not wolves, as she had herself remarked, and she could write everything she knew for sure about those on a grain of rice. With a crayon.
“No,” she said. “A big rock.”
“Then you leapt at it.”
“Yes.”
Nakaroth grunted. He moved her hand, making her pet him a few times before he released his grip on her. “Fellcats come into our Land sometimes,” he said. “A mated pair can kill a wyvern easily, but a mated pair of wyvern can kill even a denning fellcat, so I think there are no fellcats here now. Do you have fellcats on Earth?”
